16 February 2019 10:00 AM

Saturday PS: The generation game

WE’RE all, I would guess, familiar with the “golden age” fallacy, the notion that everything has been going downhill almost since forever and that the age of chivalry/of the gentleman/of heroes is over.

The opposite delusion gets rather less attention. This holds that not only is everything getting better (which is certainly arguable, at least in terms of material goods) but that the younger generation represents a new type of person, greatly superior to what has gone before and heralding a new and glorious era.

Great clouds of such wishful thinking engulf us at the moment. Here are just some of the wonderful ways in which most members of the rising generation are such an enormous improvement on what went before (i.e. us):

They have little interest in owning personal property (whether music, clothes or homes) and are almost entirely unmaterialistic.

They live “clean” and ethical lives, shunning tobacco, drinking moderately (if at all), giving up meat and dairy products in ever-increasing numbers and taking regular exercise.

They have no prejudices, maintain a generous international outlook and deplore bigotry in all its forms.

They care passionately about the environment and worry about disappearing habitats and species.

They have much less interest in the financial rewards of work and look for, indeed demand, interesting and engaging jobs in workplaces that treat them with respect.

As we ponder the glories of this homo superior, one or two little niggles may be felt.

One is that we have heard it all before. Check out The Greening of America, by Charles A. Reich (Random House; 1970), the celebration of the hippy revolution and its wider manifestations that Reich seemed to believe would go on forever, changing society entirely. Reich posited three stages of consciousness.

In Consciousness One, societies were punitive and sought to manage their populations through harsh punishments and the workhouse.

Consciousness Two arrived with the 20th Century welfare states and rational social policies. An example given was the abandonment of relying on tough penalties for bad driving to make streets safer in favour of better road signage and generally more intelligent traffic engineering.

All good clean (ish) fun, no doubt, but after Consciousness III came something Reich failed to foretell, Consciousness IV, the rampaging materialism of the “yuppie” generation, the Billy Bunters of the Eighties and Nineties who grabbed handfuls of tuck while chortling “greed is good”.

Two, Reich was pre-empted, in Britain at least, by enthusiasm for the post-war “classless” generation who rejected entirely the ante bellum hierarchy and snobbish homes cluttered with old furniture in favour of scientific-type careers, “gritty” realism on television and clean, modern lines in fashion, furniture and home design.

The election triumph of Harold Wilson in 1964 confirmed that this generation had arrived, albeit Wilson’s age disqualified him from membership.

Three, declaring that evolution has taken a leap forward and a higher order of the species has emerged has long been favourite among totalitarian regimes. The “New Soviet Man”, the “Aryan superman” of Nazi myth, the “Old People” (agricultural peasants) whom the Khmer Rouge declared to be the only type allowed in Cambodia, forcing all other people on to the land.

This ought to give us at least a pause for thought.

Four, how real is this un-materialistic, selfless, open-minded, clean-living breed? Is there any evidence that its members are any less (or more) self-interested than those who went before? Don’t special factors help explain some of the above?

For example, a lack of interest in owning property may well spring from the near-impossibility of being able to buy it, certainly in the south-east, while ownership of music is, on the purely practical level, un-necessary in the age of streaming.

The idea that everyone was giving up meat last did the rounds in the mid-Nineties, at the times of the mad-cow scare and the row over live animal exports. That didn’t quite work out, did it?

So, they have no prejudices? Neither do I (other than against skateboarders and people who cycle on the pavement). What do they want – a medal?

Finally, the demand for “interesting” work with employers who will treat them nicely is, surely, a by-product of full employment? When that goes, so, I would guess, will a lot of this sense of entitlement, if not in this cohort, then in the next.

That’s the trouble with the generation game. There’s always another along before too long.

Saturday miscellany

ONE alleged manifestation of this marvellous new breed with its superior consciousness came yesterday, with the “strike” of schoolchildren to protest against climate change. It was sheer chaos, the trains didn’t run, the power went off…oh, hang on, none of that happened because this couldn’t be a real strike, given school pupils have no connection with the delivery of goods or services. They’re not so much the means of production as the means of consumption. The last mass truant (sorry, "young people expressing their values in a very real sense") was just ahead of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. While many simpered over the idealism of "our kids", Andrew Marr had a better take: "It was all so much more fun than double maths."

SOME time ago, I wrote a piece for the Lion & Unicorn site on “preachy TV”, the growing habit of lumbering supposedly-entertaining drama with ideologically-sound messages. Those in the frame included Sherlock and Judge John Deed. The opening episode of the new series of Grantchester (ITV) was, in this regard, an absolute beaut. The crime-fighting 1950s vicar hosts a visit by black civil rights campaigners from the Deep South. One of their number is killed. Many locals are horribly racist. Meanwhile, the vicar’s partner, the local police inspector, takes an un-PC view of his missus going back to work. The curate conducts a gay relationship with a local man. Oh, and to round it off, the killer is not, as suspected, one of the other black Americans, but an affluent white Brit posing as a liberal. Every box ticked, a full house.

WEDNESDAY evening saw no fewer than five “rail enforcement officers” (most junior of the four – count ‘em – Police-type outfits on the railway) at a local small-town station. They were perfectly friendly, from what I could see, but it was quite difficult to work out what they were actually doing. Meanwhile, the imminent dismantlement of the gas holder in the same town led me to revisit two assumptions about such installations and find both of them wrong. One was that use of the word “gasometer” to describe them was inaccurate. Untrue – they were invented by the French and that’s what they called them. The other was that gas holders became obsolete once we switched from town gas to natural gas. Untrue – they are still used to balance the supply of natural gas.